Why You Need A Website To Podcast (Ep17)

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Why you need a website to podcast and why you shouldn’t just set up a soundcloud or libsyn account.

We talked about the cost associated with starting a podcast and some of those cost are things like buying a domain name and getting some hostings. I want to talk about why you actually need a website to podcast and why you shouldn’t just setup a SoundCloud account or something like that. You can do podcasting without a website, I want to be upfront with you here. It is completely possible. You can use the SoundCloud RSS feed there’s Libsyn, which is another provider, they have an RSS feed. You can use Spreecast, they have an RSS feed. But, I’m going to go through – and hopefully convince you, that it’s going to be worthwhile having a website for your podcast.

Okay, now in to the 7 reasons why you need a website to podcast. The first reason you need a website to podcast is that it gives you full control of your podcast. You may not think that things are changing right now. But, as you begin to podcast, you learn so much along the way and chances are, you may not have setup everything correctly or you may want to change things about your podcast and your brand. By having your own website, this gives you full control of your podcast. Some of the limitations with going to someone else is that it can be difficult to change the sequence of your podcast. So if you accidentally get your podcast out of sequence, that can be a hard thing to edit.

Another thing is, if your change the branding of your podcast and you’re changing over to a new brand, that can be extremely difficult to change. Which means you will have to lose all of your listeners, all of your subscribers and start again if you want to change your brand. So, having that full control – I need you to trust me on this one, having that full control is so important if you’re going to be a serious podcaster. I wish that you’d get that full control with other services but it’s actually quite difficult and it’s better just to control it yourself, on your own website. And in future lessons, I’m going to show you exactly how to do that.

The second reason is that you then have somewhere to send people to. One of the things with podcasting that makes it, I guess, slightly harder than other mediums is you can’t hyperlink in podcast. You can’t get people to click a link and simply go to where you want them to go. You need to spell things out for people. I need to tell you to go to podcastfast.com. You then need to open your web browser, you need to manually type it in. If you’re on SoundCloud and you’re like, “Go to soundcloud.com/feed/podcastfast”. Are you likely to remember that and enter it in? Probably not. And even if you got there you couldn’t really do much. So, by having your own website, you have somewhere to send people to which can be really important.

The third reason is that you can collect email addresses of your listeners. This is something you definitely can’t do in SoundCloud or the other media host but you can do with your own website. For example, with this course, I’ve got a lot of bonus add-ons that I haven’t included in the course but that you can get for free if you subscribe to my email newsletter. For example, today’s episode, we’ve actually got a website step-by-step setup guide which you can get at podcastfast.com/setup. Now, you go to podcastfast.com/setup, you’ll be prompted to enter in your email address to get that step-by-step setup guide. And then, obviously, I can contact you in the future; let you know updates about the industry.

Let you know about any products that I may launch or service that I may launch. And so, it allows me to keep in touch with my readers. And that’s something you can do as well. You can collect email addresses; get to know your readers. And so if I ever launch something related to this or something that you might find interesting, I can let you know about it. It’s great for my listeners and it’s great for me as well to be able to contact them.

Fourth reason why you should have your own website is then you can sell your own products. If you’re watching the video, I’ve got a picture of one of my eBooks, “Up the Rent” here, which is for OnProperty. And because I have my own website, I was able to create an eBook like this one. I can put it up on my website and I can direct people there and I can sell it to people. Or, I can direct people to something for free, collect their email address, and then through their email address I can let them know about my products and they can potentially buy my products. I got another eBook, which sells for about $10 and I sell about 1 per day. I’ve got a membership course as well, there’s a whole bunch of products I have and the only reason I’m able to have those products and sell them is because I have my own website. So selling products on your website is a great way to make money from your podcast but you need to have a website to do it.

The fifth reason is that you can get Google and Youtube traffic. So if you’re on podcasting, your number 1 traffic source is going to be iTunes. That’s just what happens. Second is probably going to be Stitcher Radio or something like that, one of the smaller players. But if you have your own website, you can get transcriptions done for your podcast and in a future lesson, I’m going to show you how to get those done for cheap. And you can also upload your podcast to Youtube as well, which I’m going to show you how to do in future lessons. This means you’re not only going to get podcast traffic, but you’re going to get traffic from Youtube. And if you get your podcasts transcribed, you can get traffic from Google as well for the podcast that you’ve recorded. So it just widens your net and means you can reach more people, which is going to be significant specially if you’re using a podcast to make money or grow your business.

The sixth reason is that it gives you the opportunity to turn web browsers into listeners. A lot of web browsers – people who are browsing the web and just typing into Google don’t actually know much about podcasting and they might not know that you have a podcast but they search for something on your topic, they come to your website because you’ve done the transcription and they see the podcast episode there. They also see a subscribe link, they click it. And hey, you’ve got a new subscriber to your podcast because of your website. So not only can you track podcast subscribers through dedicated services like iTunes and like Stitcher Radio, but you can actually turn people who are just browsing the web, who found you on Google, you can turn them into podcast listeners and grow your base. Which will, again, help you make more money, attract more customers, etcetera, etcetera.

And the seventh reason is that you can build an asset that you control and that you can potentially sell in the future. Let’s take my OnProperty podcast for example. That podcast gets about 400-600 downloads per day. Imagine if I went to someone and it was just a podcast. And I said to them, “Hey, would you like to buy my podcast? It gets about 400-600 downloads per day.” It’s actually going to be a pretty hard thing to sell. However, if I go to someone and say, “Hey, do you want to buy my website onproperty.com.au? I’ve got about 5,000 email subscribers.

The website gets 800-1000 visitors per day. I’ve also got a podcast that gets 400-600 downloads per day. And a Youtube channel as well that gets about 200 views per day.” Package all of that up, that is now an extremely valuable asset that I could sell to someone in the industry or someone who wanted to run that property blog, build it up. I’ve also got a passive income attached to that blog because of the products that I created. And so I’ve got this asset that I now control, it generates passive income for me and I can potentially sell it.

If I didn’t have a website and I just had a podcast, chances of me making passive income from the products, chances of me getting Google traffic from people typing into Google, the chances of me making money and having this asset that I can sell, is very small. So it’s very valuable that you can have that.

Now, I’m going to go through – in upcoming lessons, of exactly how you can setup your website. But if you are daunted by setting up your own website, you know you want one, you know you want one but you just don’t know how to do it. Well, I’ve actually got a website step-by-step setup guide for you, which you can download and you can follow step by step so you don’t miss anything. Go to podcastfast.com/setup in order to get that step-by-step guide.

Again, I’m going to be going through all this in future lessons of this series. However, if you want that downloadable guide, you can get it by going to podcastfast.com/setup. So that ends today’s episode of “Why You Need a Website to Podcast?” I hope, beyond whole hope, that I’ve convinced you that you do need a website in order to start a podcast. And I really hope that you go and you take the extra effort to set that up and to follow the steps that I give you to set it up correctly.

So until next lesson, don’t just podcast, podcastfast.

And lucky, lucky last, if you’ve been enjoying this series and you want to help share this series with other people who will find it interesting, please go to podcastfast.com/love and share the love. You can share this podcast on social media or you can follow the instructions and leave a review on iTunes, which is going to help push us up in the rankings and give us more visibility. If you can, please give back to us in that way, we would love it. Go to podcastfast.com/love in order to do that. And remember, don’t just podcast, podcastfast.